PajamaManufacturing

You are ready for the homeworker revolution. But are you ready for the home manufacturer revolution?

Over the last couple of years, some of us have been hearing about MIT’s FabLab (officially “The Center for Bits and Atoms”). Professor Neil Gershenfeld has been leading a potential revolution in desktop manufacturing (the fab in fabrication). The idea is that a PC could “drive a printer that deposits material in layers to form three-dimensional objects.” For the moment, this is useful primarily for prototypes or mini-manufacturing (manufacturing of object with limited public demand), but let your imagination wander.

The most advanced desktop fabricators are also known as 3-D printers. They cost about $25,000 - $35,000 and they fit comfortably into a home office.They’ve been used for a wide variety of things including architecture and medicine. According to Bruce Sterling, most of them work “by assembling bits of powder and glue or depositing layer upon layer of ceramic, paper, or plastic.”

Now, Cornell University is joining into the 3-D manufacturer-printer world. A home manufacturing free-for-all can’t be to far away.

To quote an article from the “New Science Tech” website, “Some day, Lipson believes, every home will have a ‘fabber,’ a machine that replicates objects from plans supplied by a computer. Such devices could change how we acquire common products, he suggests: Instead of buying an iPod, you would download the plans over the Internet and the fabber would make one for you.

Read entire article.

PajamaJournalism

An exciting piece in Wired News today about a project called Assignment Zero, a project that could also be called “PajamaJournalism.” We all know that some of the better bloggers out there have been correcting false news reports and factchecking the mainstream media for the last several years. But Assignment Zero is the first project we know of – with any seriousness of intention -- that tries to organize itself as a sort-of open source, decentralized news service.

And their first area of investigation is right up PajamaNation’s alley:

"We're going to investigate the growth and spread of crowdsourcing, which overlaps with something called peer production. (Yochai Benkler's complete term is "commons-based peer production.") This basically means people making valuable stuff by cooperating online, mainly because they want to and sometimes because they're paid to assist."

Read the entire piece

Famous To 15 People

It’s not my intention here to brag, but back in 1989 I published a tribute to Andy Warhol where I predicted that in the digital age, every individual would be a multimedia corporation – an “art factory.” “In the future,” I wrote, “everybody will be famous to fifteen people.” That’s the Long Tail!

This is closely related to the idea behind Pajamanation. But you don’t have to be in media to participate in this sociocultural shift, you just need to have a skill or service to offer and a way to get online regularly.

As Thomas Friedman has written, communications and other technologies have made the world “flat” – it’s put us all into the same space, provided we are able to get online. And it’s increasingly distributed the desktop tools that we need to produce work at the same level as large institutions. For example, the editing power that used to cost a video filmmaker $500,000 now comes in software that can cost as little as $500 or in some cases can be had for free.

Anyway, if you’re here, you probably already know about this paradigm shift. Over the weeks, months and years to come, I will be blogging here about this new world that Pajamanation is here to service. I will post about – and link to – not only materials directly related to micro-entrepreneurialism and the decentralization of work, but the decentralization of all aspects of social relations, whether it involves people getting their entertainment on YouTube or their gourmet foods at a specialty shop instead of sticking with the supermarket.

I will also be exploring the economics and politics of the flat world 10, 20, 30 years out… (all in good time)

For starters, I think you will find this piece on San Francisco’s Neo-Nomads or Cyber-Bedouins a vivid reflection of our PajamaCulture. It is all about people who have turned our local coffee shops into their home offices.

Not that this is terribly new. The San Francisco Chronicle has run this same basic story every three years since 1994. It’s just that the convenience and the ease and the transportable digital power keeps growing exponentially, so more people can nomadize their work activity better.

RU Sirius

I did not do it!

Sometimes a minute of inattentiveness can change your life forever.

Yesterday, my friend and management team member, the incomparable RU Sirius, America's Cultural Icon, wrote me a mail saying that he had copy-edited our pajamanation website. RU has some subtle manoeuvers in semantic darkness that make a text suddenly seem reaching out to you. He also asked me to pay a small bill on penpal. I had not heard about penpal before, but thought it was probably something San Francisco like, that was the writer's or artist version of paypal. So I logged into the site, accessed and immediately registered. It asked for my name, my day of birth, my year of birth, my month of birth, my address and it went into a new screen. I was expecting it to ask for my credit card when an extraordinary question popped up: have you finished high school or more? As I was just having a telephone conversation on the other end, I just indicated that I had 'more' and then the second question came: what sort of friends are you looking for? I did not really know what to reply, so thinking of Ken I said, 'writers'. Then I was logged in.

Later Ken send me a mail saying, of course, that he meant Paypal. To my amazement I went back to the site I registered in and found myself between teens and preteens from Alabama who exchange extraordinary items of information such as : 'hi I am josh and I have a cat.' Then I saw myself, a white male from Belgium, 50 years old (!) saying 'I am looking for writer penpals' please respond to my address w@pajamanation.com. There was also an automatic mention 'yes I am availalable in a chat room'. Oh my God.

Ken, man, I could go to jail for this. The site is in Texas!!

Me, My skills and I

A few years ago, I made a radical change in my way of thinking. I suddenly realized it had taken my partner 15 years to delete 20 years of education my parents and the system had given me. I am french and under the pretext of being leftish, in favor of a world of solidarity and equality they taught me to play the cards life had given me the best I could. I was allowed sometimes to change the combination of the cards but that was it, never the cards itself.

But what if the cards are not good no matter what the combination is? What if this configuration is just not in harmony with your skills and your need of self-realization? What if you need other cards and you actually even don't know it? And worse, you don't how to get those cards because you have nor the courage nor the knowledge to do so.

Well this is what my partner taught me: you don't like your cards, get others! It is very fashionable to be assertieve, but in reality, the voices of mummies and daddies are hard-wired and sound through walls: be careful don't lose your job... Be careful or you will lose your job... Dont' say that or you will not have the job... Keep your job or you will have no pension!

Well here is the bad news and the good news at once: my generation will not have a pension.
We must try to start our own business, from home, at our ease. We must take care of ourselves, of our lives, of our destiny, we have to try. No more mummies and daddies whispering 'I told you so' every time you have a bad day, or your income is less than expected. All that rebellion and assertiveness was finally worth it but now I need a second step. I need a community. There is no government on earth coming to rescue me. It is up to me, my skills and I.

Sam

A world of labour in terms of cooking

Let’s think of the world of labour in terms of cooking. The hunting society was primarily interested in the ingredients; the farmers invented storage so that the community could preserve food for a “rainy day”; the industrialists made the machines to process food; the managers delivered the cooks but the future will be in the hands of the recipes, not of cooks. The ingredients (raw materials) and the processing will be selected on a global level based on price, performance and quality. The order intake and the fulfillment will be outsourced locally. The recipe however will be glocal: thought of in one place in the form of patent, franchise or format (or any other packaged business knowledge), produced globally and distributed locally. Homeworkers will be recipemakers, cooks, ingredient suppliers and sometimes storage facilitators. They can be one or all in one, depending how they market themselves.

Of course when you read this you will think that this is again neo-liberal bullshit. But let’s call a spade a spade. A micro-entrepreneur is usually a different word for a long term unemployed person. We are talking about entrepreneurs out of necessity. We are living in a knowledge economy. In the west we are told that we need to look to add value to labor. We are told that our competence and skills are a life long process of learning and that this will make our price in the market. But what does it all mean when you lose your job? We think it means that in a knowledge economy, competences become commodities. They can be sold and traded, and that is a new concept. The trading on services because up to now we have been trading on assets all over the world. We are now talking of a derivative of work that needs to be marketed. Somebody makes a translation, somebody else copy edits it, somebody else designs it, somebody else supplies it with pictures, and the last one prints it. That is how you add value. But somewhere in the beginning of the line there may be a salesman who buys the service to be rendered, splits it up and in the end coordinates it again and sells it again. That is trading on services.

A market is a place where things are bought and sold.

We must be realistic: unemployment will not go away. Even if our economy now embarks upon the largest growth ever known in its history, jobs will never simply come back. Robotization, informatics and globalisation have been their silent killers. We are faced with an economic paradigm shift and we have to be careful or we disappear between the tectonic plates. We (and our political leaders) must have the courage to disconnect from the fantasy that jobs can be created. We do not need more jobs. For heaven’s sake, the ‘job’ as we know it is exactly the problem. We certainly don’t need more of that. On the contrary, jobs should disappear. The definition of a job as a little boxed entity in which we can find a job description connected to a solid hourly work schedule and a variety of benefits guaranteed through governmental negotiation – such as pension rights, unemployment benefits and health insurance, plus taxes that are recouped both from employer and employee – is no longer useful. The whole job model should be abandoned, because it prevents us from looking forward at a time when there is no time to lose. Without jobs, there will be plenty of work which we will be able to divide over smaller job packages, but the ‘job’ itself must evaporate, because they are holding us down.

Our economy is market-oriented. The market provides a lot of work, but no ‘jobs’: we have invented this concept. A market is a place where things are bought and sold. It’s a space for work without bounds, now providing fulltime and part-time jobs, then temporarily dwindling into unemployment. Sometimes the market place supplies work through freelance contracts or barter, sometimes via consultancy or micro-entrepreneurship. The trend of personalization fits this flexible work scheme, but standardization (standard wages, hours, job descriptions, pension rights, health insurance, unemployment benefits, work place ...) derives from an industrial work model that has long gone.

There is no doubt that kicking the habit of the job concept will be difficult. However, a world without jobs doesn’t necessarily mean a world without work. There is plenty of work, more even than there used to be, but the notion of a job, as it was conceived in the process of the industrial revolution, should be abandoned. We can start our own businesses. We can set up virtual companies (assembled from independent suppliers connected to one another through a joint product, a joint product strategy or a communication medium) or multiple companies at the same time; we can establish ourselves as an artist, we can work as ‘inplacement’ for an existing company; we can set-up our own transactions (real estate, project management ...) as a dealer; we can become consultant in our own area expertise; or we can work as a freelancer or as a part-time worker, all at the same time. We will no longer have ‘one job’ and we should not expect it to be so any longer. The word ‘job’ is only a hundred years old. Before that time, people had ‘work’ and this lasted for thousands of years, without difficulties worthy of mention. It should be possible to return to such a model.

To argue that jobs will return is as nonsensical as to claim that cotton nappies will return to replace diapers or that traditional postal services will replace e-mail services with a vengeance.